


Nothing Else

by asbestosgang



Category: RedLetterMedia RPF
Genre: Dark, Death, Help, Horror, Lightning Fast verse, Monsters, a project I did for a creative writing class, beer lmao, big spooky monsters, but also not really, how do i do tags, not romantic but they're both there, some blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-20 03:53:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20668874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asbestosgang/pseuds/asbestosgang
Summary: Mike is in Hell, probably.





	Nothing Else

He’s lived here as long as he can remember. Although, really, he doesn’t know if he can call it living. 

Mike exists in a bubble, an uncanny valley where things almost make sense. He exists in a house--or something resembling a house. There’s only one room and a short hallway leading to a front door that nobody ever goes through. Mike spends most of his time in this room that could be considered a “living room”, though nothing feels alive in it. There is a dusty old bookshelf against the right wall, a shoddy wooden table on the left, and two chairs in the center, facing a heavily outdated television that never seems to work.

There are empty beer bottles scattered all across the stained wooden floor. The amount of beer bottles in the room never changes, even though Mike and Jay drink more and more every day. There are always forty-seven. He counted one afternoon, or maybe it was in the morning; he isn’t sure. Time doesn’t move as it should here.

There are two windows, one next to the bookshelf and one by the wooden table. Nobody ever bothers to look out them. Mike did once, in the beginning, and never did again. There’s no point in it. The sky is always blue and cloudless. The weather is always fine, not too hot, not too cold. It never rains. It’s never dark. 

He exists with one other man named Jay, who doesn’t have a last name. Neither does Mike, come to think of it. They spend most of their time together, sitting in the center chairs, Jay on the right, Mike on the left. Sometimes they eat, usually they drink beer. He doesn’t know where they get the food or drink from, because he’s never seen the front door open. He doesn’t ask.

They talk most of the time, usually about movies that Mike doesn’t remember seeing, but has opinions on nonetheless. He must have seen them, at some point, to be able to talk about them, but he doesn't remember going to a movie theatre. He doesn’t remember leaving the house. He doesn’t know what’s on the other side of the front door. Nobody does.

Their conversations feel scripted at times, stilted, like they’re imitating human dialogue. Every now and then, Mike faintly remembers that it wasn’t always like this. Not in the beginning, if there was a beginning. They used to be more real, more alive. Now they let the words fall unceremoniously to the floor, a cold, monotonic rhythm, filling up the space between them. There’s never much emotion behind it, as if they’re reading the lines of a script. If he closes his eyes he can almost imagine strings wrapped around his body, controlling what he says and does. He doesn’t know how long it’s been like this. 

He doesn’t want to know.

A few days or perhaps a few weeks ago, Jay started acting strange. He seemed antsy, startling at the slightest of sounds. He was twitchy, his foot tapping impatiently, his eyes wild like a frightened animal. He would mutter things to himself that Mike couldn’t quite catch--something that sounded like his name, and a series of numbers. When Mike tried to ask him about it, he put his finger to his lips and frantically motioned around the room, at the empty space around them. At nothing. There was nothing there, and yet Jay was afraid.

One day, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped talking and stood up. Mike stared at him, bewildered, the hypnotic rhythm of their artificial conversation halted. Jay’s eyes were wide, his hands trembling and body tense. 

“What are you doing?” Mike asked, the words sincere, genuine. They were his own for once, and they startled him. Jay looked at him, desperate and scared. He’d never seen that kind of expression on Jay’s face before. He’d never really seen any expression on Jay’s face, not in a very long time. It felt wrong, like he had discovered something he shouldn’t have seen.

“I’m going home.”

Jay ran out the doorway of the living room before Mike could ask him what he meant. He heard the front door slam, something he’d never heard before. He stood up to follow him, or stop him, or help him, or maybe just to see what was on the other side. For whatever reason, he wanted to go. 

He needed to go.

The TV crackled to life, causing Mike to jump. It had never worked before. He stared at it, watching text appear slowly on the grimy screen.

_ Don’t worry about him. He’ll be back soon enough. _

The text lingered for a few seconds, before disappearing. The TV crackled again, and a new message was projected.

_ Sit down and wait. _

Mike understood, somehow, that it wasn’t a suggestion. No, it was an order. A warning. 

A threat. 

So he obeyed. He sat back down. The screen fizzled out to black again. He waited. 

And as he sat waiting, he thought, for there was nothing else to do. What did Jay mean? Wasn’t this their home? This thing resembling a house with one room and two windows with a view of a sky that never changes and a TV that’s never worked until now and exactly forty-seven beer bottles lying on the floor at all times? This thing that doesn’t obey the passage of time with two worn chairs and a stale, dead smell and peeling wallpaper and an old, rotting bookshelf and a Mike and Jay who don’t have last names? Mike didn’t understand. Where was Jay going? Could he go anywhere at all? Where was his home, if not here? This is all they have, all they’d ever had.

At the thought, Mike felt something tug at his chest, sadness and longing flowing through his body for something he couldn’t quite recognize, and he closed his eyes, hoping it would go away. It didn’t.

But he waited.

The television was right. Jay came back, a few hours or maybe years later, his eyes hollow and filled with pain. He stood in the doorway to the living room for a moment, barely breathing. Mike turned around in his chair to gape at him. Neither of them said anything. Grabbing a fresh beer from the table, he looked in Mike’s direction, but he didn’t seem to see anything as he collapsed into his chair, the one he always sat in. Jay forced himself to start talking from right where they’d left off, as if nothing had happened, as if he’d never left, but his voice was weak and shaky as he tried in vain not to cry. The rhythm was broken, off-kilter, jagged and wrong somehow. Like him.

“Jay?” Mike asked, going off the script he didn’t know he had. “Where did you go?”

Jay shook his head hopelessly, the feeble attempt at a façade falling away with his tears.

“Nowhere.”

Silence.

Silence.

He spoke again.

“I’m...I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his voice full of emotions that Mike has never heard before, the beer bottle hanging limply from his trembling hand.

“Why?” The question came out strained, desperate, and Mike realized he’d started crying, too. Jay looked at him, really looked at him, and his eyes cleared as the tortured expression seemed to fade away, replaced by one of grim acceptance. His hands became steady, the tears stopped falling, and he gritted his teeth with a weary resolve. He stood up and walked towards the table with a single-minded determination, bottle in hand, looking back at Mike like one might observe an animal in a cage, with a sense of guiltless pity. An observer, uninvolved, unaffected. 

It wasn’t his problem anymore.

Jay paused--his expression warm, warped, satisfied, terrified, a cacophony of emotions swirling around on his face--and Mike understood in the back of his mind that this was his farewell gift to him. An answer to his question, one he wasn’t sure he should’ve asked.

“There’s nothing else.”

With one swift movement, Jay smashed the bottle against the table, booze and glass cascading to the floor, and stabbed the sharp remains into his neck.

Mike saw him fall, the blood pooling out from his twitching body, mixing with the beer and glass shards. He heard him coughing, choking, his breath wheezing out of his body as he lay dying. He watched him struggle to raise his arm, to reach out to him, their eyes locking together as Jay managed an apologetic smile.

His bloody arm fell back to the floor.

Mike did nothing. It didn’t feel real. He didn’t want it to feel real. 

After hours or maybe seconds, Jay fell silent, his eyes glassy, his body still, and Mike looked away, a strangled scream falling from his lips. More time passed--he couldn’t be bothered to guess how much anymore--and he finally stood up on weak legs, trying to run towards Jay. To close his eyes, to carry him away, to make sure he was solid, to do anything at all, just to reach him and cry because his friend, the only other person he’d ever known, was dead. He made it three steps before he fell to the floor and the world disappeared.

He woke up in his chair, sitting next to Jay in the living room, surrounded by forty-seven empty beer bottles and two windows looking out into a clear blue sky. There was no blood. No body. Just Mike with a splitting headache and Jay with no last name and a dead silent TV in front of them. Jay smiled at him.

“Have a nice nap?” He quipped, his eyes bright and warm. It reminded Mike of the beginning, or what he could remember of the beginning. When Jay was sharp-tongued and quick-witted, when he didn’t look so tired or scared or sad all the time. When Mike still felt like his own person, when he still felt alive. 

Had he ever felt alive? 

“I had a dream,” he started, and Jay tilted his head, curious. Alert, animated, alive, so alive.

It wasn’t Jay.

“I had a dream that...that you died. You killed yourself. You...I watched you die.”

“Jeez,” Jay snorted, shaking his head as if Mike was an idiot. Maybe he was. But it wasn’t a dream. And this wasn’t Jay.

“I mean, as you can see, I’m still here.”

“Yeah. What a shame,” Mike said slowly, staring at Jay, or the thing that resembled Jay, sitting in a chair in this room that resembled a home. His eyes were clear, his face expressive, his hands steady, his body relaxed. He was happier, more enthusiastic and energetic than the real Jay had ever been. 

It made Mike feel sick.

“Wow, how rude. Why’re you in such a bad mood?” Jay asked, his voice patronizing, prompting, urging him to stick to the script. Mike was supposed to act like Jay came back, or maybe to act like he’d never left in the first place. He never went outside the front door. He never came back. He never died.

“Well, Jay…” The words felt like they had been pulled from his body, and he understood. He started talking, parroting the words projected into his mind. He didn’t even need to think about it anymore. It was a habit, second nature, something driven into him over and over like a nail into wood until it was embedded directly into his brain. But something kept calling to him from the recesses of his mind, from what was left of his memory. Something that Jay, the real Jay, had said to him, that had hit him strangely in the chest and stuck there ever since, refusing to leave him alone.

Home.

Mike wanted to go home.

He ignored it at first, even though it tugged at him constantly. He played his role, and nothing changed for months, maybe minutes. But the feeling grew stronger, unrelenting, incessant, insistent, until he couldn’t think about anything else. Until it was killing him to have to sit in this chair in front of a broken TV in a broken house with a broken sky outside. Until he wanted to burn it all down, everything, the forty-seven empty beer bottles, the crumbling, rotten walls, the filthy bookshelf, the man that wasn’t Jay, the memories that weren’t his.

That was when he found the note.

It was hidden under the cushion of Jay’s chair, scrawled in messy, frantic handwriting. Mike only found it because he was poking around while Jay was gone, during a brief moment of peace when there were no more lines to read. This Jay didn’t stay in the room with him when he didn’t have to. This Jay came and went as he pleased. This house was not a cage for this Jay.

It pissed Mike off. 

He took the note and unfolded it carefully. He couldn’t tell how old it was. Curious, the tugging at his chest increasing until it was unbearable, he started to read.

_My name is Jay _ <strike> _Bao Bam Baum _ </strike> _I don’t remember. I don’t remember my last name. But I have to have one, right? _ <strike>_Do you remember me_ _Who am I? _</strike> _I don’t remember where I’m from. _ <strike> _Why don’t I remember_ </strike> _ I don’t remember who my parents are. I think I used to. _ <strike> _I don’t know _ </strike> _I think I used to know, but I can’t remember_ <strike> _, it’s like something is_ </strike> _. I _ <strike> _used to_ </strike> _ have parents _ <strike> _right?_ </strike> _. I have to get out of here _ <strike> _but I don’t know how _ </strike> _while I still know how. Before I forget again. _ _I<strike> don’t know how many times I’ve forgotten</strike>_ _ The door. I’ll use the door. That’s how I came in, that’s how I’ll get out. _ <strike> _I think. I can’t remember how I got here but_ </strike> _ I want to go home. _ _<strike>I need your help</strike> _ _I have to go home. _ <strike>_If they catch me_ </strike> _<strike>If I don’t make it</strike> _ _My address is _ <strike> _743 744 I don’t remember why can’t I remember 74 _ </strike> _734 East St. Mike, _ <strike> _what’s your name? Is your name really Mike? Do you know? _ </strike> _ if you’re reading this, get out. You can’t stay here. _ _<strike>If I die Come with me</strike> _ _I’ll wait for you. I’ll wait for you, so get out. _ <strike> _Meet me at 73 74 _ </strike> _Before you forget how. _ <strike> _You need to run I don’t know what’s happening I don’t know where I am I’m scared I want to go home I don’t know my name THEY’RE COMING BACK _ </strike> _JUST GET THE FUCK OUT._

Mike didn’t realize he’d stopped breathing until he had to gasp for air, the room spinning around him. The last line was desperate, practically carved into the page, and he could almost see Jay scratching it into the paper, stuffing it under his chair before whatever was watching them could see it. He was afraid of “them”, whatever “they” were, so afraid that he ran away from the only place they’d ever known. But then, why did he come back? What was out there?

He stood up and left the room before he even realized he’d been moving. For a moment, he stood in the hallway, staring at the front door, the note clamped in his hand, urging him to step forward. So he did. One foot in front of the other. Very. Very. Slowly. He couldn’t understand how Jay had run out so quickly. Mike struggled to take even a single step.

The door opened.

“Where are you going?” Jay asked as he stood in front of him, startled, his voice a little too sweet, a little too cheerful. Mike whispered the answer, like a child afraid of being scolded.

“Home.”

Jay’s face contorted, irritation combined with something like pity. He stepped towards Mike, his hands open and inviting, a fake smile spreading across his face that filled Mike with dread. This was his last chance. If he didn’t leave now, he was never getting out. Mike stepped backwards, kicking an empty beer bottle that had been lying in the hallway, one he’d never seen before because he’d never made it this far outside of the room. He looked down at it, realizing he’d been counting wrong this whole time.

There were forty-eight.

Without hesitation, he picked up the bottle and slammed it against the wall, watching as it cracked and shattered, leaving a sinister, jagged weapon in his hand. 

It worked for one Jay, after all. Why not the other? 

Jay lunged forward to stop him, but Mike was bigger than him, and slammed him against the wall, stabbing the edges of the bottle into his chest. Jay gasped in pain, or maybe just surprise, as he slid down to the floor, stunned, blood--or maybe just something resembling blood--seeping through his shirt. Mike turned and ran out the front door, not looking back. It was dark, so dark he couldn’t see in front of him. There was no blue sky. There was nothing. He heard the thing that wasn’t Jay calling after him weakly from inside the house, telling him to come back. Come back home. But Mike didn’t, of course he didn’t, because he knew now.

This wasn’t his home.

He ran into the darkness, as far as he could, for months or maybe seconds, until he couldn’t see the house or anything at all. The darkness surrounded him, pushing against his body, causing him to falter. At times, he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. He didn’t think it mattered anymore. But he kept moving, because he had to go home.

The darkness started to whisper. Quiet, unintelligible, the sound--hopefully just sound--slithering into his ear and making him shudder. It came from above, below, in front, behind, left, right, until Mike didn’t know where he was going and where he came from. But he kept moving, as the voices grew louder and more insistent until he could hear what they were saying.

“Go back.”

“Go back.”

“Go back.”

He didn’t. But he stopped running.

Mike walked for a very long time, surrounded by nothing but darkness and smooth, slimy voices that dripped against his skin like sludge, making him feel diseased, infected. There came a point where he wondered if he was losing his mind, or perhaps his eyes had somehow adjusted to the absolute pitch black around him, because he started seeing things. 

Tendrils, tentacles, coiling and curling and swirling around him, somehow even darker than the nothingness they existed in. Slippery, slick, oozing and slithering towards him, close enough to touch. Eyes, too many eyes, almost human but much too large, bigger than Mike’s head, bulging and swelling out of the void, red-veined with large dark pupils that bored into him. They floated in the space, disjoined from the mouths with rotten teeth and decaying tongues, filled with holes, hovering above him, chanting at him, the putrid air from their breath making him gag, the tendrils brushing at his arms and legs. 

This was “them”. 

They kept whispering.

“Go back.”

“Go back.”

“Go back.”

“Go back...and entertain us.”

He stopped now, though he shouldn’t have, looking up at the eyes, so many eyes.

“What do you mean?” He asked the mouths, the eyes, the tentacles, the darkness. The voices fell silent, having said too much--after all, look what happened to the last one--but Mike understood. It had taken him a long, long time, because he’d made himself forget, he didn’t want to know, he refused to know. But he understood all of it now. The house that wasn’t a home, the Jay without a last name, the forty-eight beer bottles, the empty bookshelf, the broken TV, the fake sky. It was a cage. Just a cage. It always had been. A cage for him, for Jay, with nothing outside of it except darkness and an audience. A cage in a zoo with no other exhibits. A cage with a door that leads to nowhere.

A cage with no exit.

He realized now that he didn’t know where he was going. “Home”. He wanted to go home, but where was it? What was it? He didn't know. He didn’t remember. Did he ever? He had run away from the thing that wasn’t a home, looking for something, looking as hard as he could, but he didn’t even know what it was anymore. The concept of “home”, somewhere he belonged, somewhere he needed to be, somewhere that wasn’t here, felt impossible, because this was all he had, “home” or not. There was nothing else.

“Home” never existed, did it?

“Mike.”

He heard Jay behind him. No, not Jay. Someone, something else. He’d found him. It was foolish of Mike to think that whoever this was would die like a human. Like Jay. Getting stabbed in the heart with a beer bottle probably just pissed it off. Mike paused, because he knew if he stopped here, if he turned around, if he came back, it would be over. One way or another, it would be over. But he turned anyways, desperate for an answer, an explanation, a way out, a way home.

Jay stood in front of him, blood still flowing smoothly from the glass embedded in his chest. His shirt was stained red now, but nothing else had changed. His hair was perfectly kept, his eyes bright, filled with something that Mike had mistaken for life. But they were just as empty as the blue sky in the windows. He looked at Mike with pity, because this Jay wasn't the one in the cage; no, he was the zookeeper. 

“Hey, Jay…” Mike started, the tendrils curling around his body, the eyes staring curiously at him, the darkness pressing against him until he felt like he couldn’t breathe. But he wanted--no, needed to know.

Tears fell from his eyes as his knees became weak, his hands started to shake, and his vision blurred. He knew the answer. But he asked anyways, because there was nothing else for him to do. There was nowhere for him to go, and there never was. His voice was small, like a frightened child, lost and confused and alone, so alone.

He just wanted to go home.

“Where do I live?” 

There was silence, hopeless silence, as Jay shook his head slowly, giving him a bitter, rueful smile.

“Mike…”

He collapsed, and as he fell into the darkness, he heard Jay mutter something.

“You fucking idiot.”

Mike woke up in his chair, the chair he always sits in. Jay was sitting next to him, in front of the broken TV, drinking a beer. The guard, watching over this place that wasn’t a home, barely even a house. But they didn’t even need a guard, not really. No matter what he did, no matter where he went, he was never going to leave. There was nowhere else to go. After all, the cage didn’t even have a door. 

He knew now why Jay had killed himself. Because he had figured out that they were never getting out of here any other way.

“Have a nice nap?” Jay asked, again, the same way he did last time. He had a small red stain on his shirt, where Mike had stabbed him. A memento, perhaps. More like a reminder. A warning. 

A threat. 

Mike didn’t respond, sickened. After a moment of silence the TV crackled to life again, and he read the words displayed on the old, dusty screen.

_ Just play your part. There’s nothing else for you to do. _

It stayed there for a few seconds, the words, the instructions, the orders, burnt into his mind. When it fizzled out, he knew that the TV was never going to turn on again. It wouldn’t have to. He remembered now, what Jay had said to him before he died. Now that Mike thought about it, he’d probably understood what was happening for a very long time. Maybe from the beginning, if there was one at all. He’d just forgotten, let himself forget, just like he forgot everything else, and he became too excited, too hopeful. He hadn’t remembered that they would never go anywhere else, they would never do anything else, because they couldn’t.

Mike noticed an unopened beer by his feet, and bent down to pick it up, examining it, as if seeing it for the first time. Jay watched him like a hawk--couldn’t let another one die, not on his watch. He opened it, the cap clattering to the ground. 

With one swift motion, Mike brought the bottle to his lips and downed it all in one second, coughing as he dropped the empty bottle to the floor. It would disappear soon. After all, there can’t ever be more than forty-eight.

Jay was staring at him. No, not just Jay. He could feel their gaze burning into him now, hundreds, thousands of eyes that the real Jay had been so afraid of, waiting outside the room. They were waiting to be entertained. That was why he was here. Maybe even for them, there’s nothing else to do, to see. Nothing else at all. 

But if they wanted to be entertained? Well, then he was going to give them a show. 

For a moment, Mike remembered the real Jay. He was waiting for him too, somewhere else, not at “home”, but somewhere even farther away, waiting and wondering why he was still here. After all, he knew now, didn’t he? He knew everything. So why didn’t he go? 

Mike took a deep breath. His voice was weak and it cracked as the words fell out, an answer, an apology, the last real words he would ever speak.

“There’s nothing else.”

He is still here. He is still in this room, in this cage resembling a house, with a zookeeper and crumbling walls and a fake sky and always, always forty-eight empty beer bottles on the floor. He is still in his chair, in front of a TV that only turned on twice and never would again. He is still here talking, a captive performer to a captive audience, because he knows there’s nothing else.

There’s nothing else, but he’s going to take what he can get.

“Well, Jay…”

He’s lived here as long as he can remember. Although, really, he doesn’t know if he can call it living.

**Author's Note:**

> never posted anything on here before. frankly, should've gotten on the train back when I was into something popular--publicity. but alas, my newest hyperfixation is sadly RedLetterMedia. anyways, gay rights


End file.
